MOTHER
MADALAINA CAPPED
her fountain pen. The last of the three letters would need to wait. She picked
up her Book of Hours, turned off her desk lamp then stood a moment, gazing out at
the moon. Her sandals flapped against the stones of the empty hallway as she
made her way through the cloister towards the chapel. She opened the carved
wooden doors and closed them quietly behind her. The six elder nuns, all but
ancient Sister Hilda, knelt awaiting their prioress, like so many pillars set
against the coming night.

The letters would go out with
the morning mail. “Please come.” She had signed them "Laina," the
intimate name all of them had called her once. She hoped the intimacy didn't
make her sound desperate or as though she were pleading. “And bring your
journals—if you still keep journals. Remember how Sister Joseph Marie insisted
that we do that?” To be truthful, she was pleading, but she didn’t want the
three x-nuns to realize, until the four were standing face to face, how much
she needed them. Teresa Moore, “Tess.” Janet Nash. Clara Fox. Hopefully all
three of her former sisters would come. True, their lives had taken different
turns since they'd left the convent during the massive exodus of the late
Sixties and early Seventies, but surely some remnant of their bond remained.
The mutual love, they must still feel it, or at the very least, remember it.

In August Lake Superior can be complex as a woman of many
moods. If human bonds couldn’t draw these former nuns to return to this place,
perhaps their bonds with nature could. Surely they hadn’t forgotten how the
four of them used to stand on the granite rock that jutted into the lake, and
cry into the wind. If Sister Joseph Marie had seen them! It made Laina chuckle,
just remembering. But she hadn’t. The novice mistress never caught them at it.
They joined hands and leaned against the wind, the powerful surf absorbing
their voices as though they cried into the open mouth of God. The cry was
wordless. A scream, really, a dissonance of tones that couldn’t blend, and yet
that cry thrilled her with its raucous insistence, never to be duplicated.

August fifteenth would mark the thirtieth anniversary of
their acceptance as aspirants into the cloister. Laina had invited them to
return for nine days, a reunion, a vacation in this spectacular place. They
each would be aware of the date’s significance. They would arrive for Vespers
on August 6th, the Transfiguration of the Lord, and stay through
August 15th, the Assumption of Our Lady. But just in case the
religious significance were not sufficient, she had attempted to tantalize them
with promises of renewed friendship, of shared memories, of present day
revelations, of solitary walks along the beach below the convent and on the
rocks above. Each could have her private room. Laina could waive the cloister
rules for these women who once had lived here anyway. Many rooms in the
cloister were empty. Only seven other nuns remained at Our Lady Star of the
Sea, and all but Laina had grown old. Thirty additional years separated her
from the youngest of the others. All those in-between had returned to the
world.

After the prayers of Compline, the other nuns retired to
their modest rooms. They removed their simple habits, post-Vatican-II habits,
inelegant smoke-blue dresses reaching mid-calf, with white polyester detachable
collars, and lighter blue veils without flow, like the veils of army nurses
during World War I. Most still wore long seersucker nightgowns and all slept on
the hard, narrow beds that had been in their rooms, or cells, since the convent
was founded at the turn of the century by the American mystic, Sophie Marie Loire.
Hopefully, soon to be Blessed Sophie Marie Loire, as the sisters had
presented her case for beatification and eventual canonization by the Holy
Father in Rome. The old nuns prayed each night for miracles in her name. All of
them had known her personally, and each of them testified daily to their
founder’s sanctity.

“And you are her successor!” they fondly reminded Laina
during recreation several times a week. “We are depending on you, Mother, to
make her known. Once she’s beatified, girls will begin to join us again.”

That would take a miracle of
the first degree, and Laina knew it. Few Catholics receive the call to
contemplative monasteries in any era, and right now Rome was drifting,
attempting to regain a foothold in doctrine. The rock of Peter, green with
mysticism such as Sophie Marie's, might feel slippery under the new pope's feet.

Laina didn’t retire to her
cell but returned to her office. The moon rode high over the lake, its
reflection giving the darkness an eerie iridescent quality. Light without
color. Moon shadows, like in the Cat Stevens song. She smiled. The world
wouldn’t think she could know about Cat Stevens, cloistered nun as she was and
had been all these thirty years. She took off her veil, shook her hair loose
and lifted her habit off over her head. From the bottom drawer of her desk, she
took the caftan that Stephen had brought from India. It was the green-gold of
her hair, and she had wondered, when she lifted it from its wrappings, at the
coincidence. He was Father Stephen
Harris, the convent chaplain, devotee of Sri Aurobindo of Pondicherry, and
former pastor of St. Rose of Lima
in Duluth. He’d
spent the summer of 1983 traveling from ashram to ashram, gleaning what he
could of the teachings of Aurobindo and Sweet Mother from those who had
actually known them and once sat at their feet.

Laina let the caftan float
down over her head and stood in the window feeling, herself, like a reflection
of the moon.

The phone rang. She reached for it quickly, before it
could ring again.

“Convent of Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Mother Madalaina
speaking.”

“Laina, it’s Philip.”

“Bishop! How good to hear your voice.”

“Do you have time to see me this evening?”

“Is something wrong?”

“I'd like to get your perspective on something that's
come up. I'll explain when I arrive. Can you make time?”

A warm breeze entered through the open window of her
office and stirred the silk.

“You know I can, Philip.”

“Good, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“It would be best not to disturb the other sisters. Meet
me on the promontory above the convent. I’ll wait on the bench there,
overlooking the lake.”

“Good plan. I’ll see you there.”

Laina set the receiver back on its cradle. Philip. She
hadn’t seen him in several weeks. Such a difficult time for him, caught as he
was between the Vatican and his instincts concerning the often raw needs of his
brother-priests. They also were caught between their consciences and the rigid
laws they were sworn to uphold despite the moral agony of so many of their
parishioners. Nor were they exempt from sin themselves. Many of them lived
ahead of church renewal, fumbling, with little real guidance from Rome, to
embody the theological visions of the Second Vatican Council. How much of the
renewal was simply doomed to disappear—a mutant experiment in the church's
evolution?

When Philip came to her for advice, or Stephen looked at
her with his deep questioning eyes, she wondered about her own destiny. Called
to monastic solitude, could she also be destined to love these men? When she
was with them she absorbed their anger, their competition, their lust to
fulfill their dreams, their despair and the violence of spirit it spawned in
them, tearing at their minds and hearts. She held their hands. She allowed them
access through eyes that she never turned away. She let them rest their
weariness against her. Sometimes they wept.

Stephen came to her each week just to sit with her in
stillness, gazing into her eyes as though they were water and he swam through
them, through her, and into God. The Divine Gaze was a practice he'd learned in
India from his guru. He left her presence trembling. “You give me hope,” he
would whisper, kneeling for her blessing. “Without you I would be lost.” And
his words tore at her heart. “I’m not the one you're seeking,” she would tell
him over and over, and he would agree but also insist that her ability to sit
in silence across from him, purely accepting him--all of this could be found
nowhere else in the church, in no one else, and without her he would be bereft
of life itself. Bereft of the Holy Spirit of God. She would bless him in the
name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier, and he would gasp as the
blessing shot straight to his heart.

The bishop, in contrast, sat beside her, talking, not
looking at her, both of them gazing out towards the lake. Often they met at the
promontory. He admitted his failings, though she had no power to absolve him.
“You make it possible for me to speak the truth, to say to God the words that
must be said."

No one is perfect, she thought as he confessed in her
presence to his God.

She changed back into her habit. It wouldn’t do to meet
the bishop in a silk caftan. She slipped her bare feet into her sandals and
lifted her profession cross from the desk where she had laid it moments before,
letting it fall over her head where it rested, simple and wooden, above her
breasts. Then she left the convent by way of a back door through the sun porch.
She walked slowly up the path to the promontory. She went all the way to the
end, to stand on the white tip the novices once named "Aphrodite’s Arm."
From there it seemed that she stood upon the moon’s path and she began to
wonder, watching the moon’s slow progression, where that path might lead. Her
lightweight veil drifted on the currents of night. She prayed in her silent
way, imagining herself as love itself, flowing in moonlight through the world
of suffering humanity. She went out of herself as water to the thirsty, as food
to the hungry, as comfort to the sorrowing, as mercy to the afflicted. “As You will,”
she whispered to whatever God might be.

She heard behind her the crisp
footfalls of the bishop. She turned around. “Bless you, Mother Madalaina,” she
heard him say as he offered her his hand, and she went down on one knee to kiss
his ring.

The Root of Beauty

THE EDGE OF TENDERNESS

THE BLUE SHAWL

The FarNear Journals

GYPSY BONES

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About Me

I'm a writer and observer of beauty in nature and people, a singer of praise and a dreamer who stares into both light and darkness hoping to see someday the Face of God.
My journey has led from the northern lakes, to a convent on the prairie, to lifelong education including a doctorate in ministry, to a vocation of midwifery of souls, to this place, Casa Chiara, where the light shines and John Sack and I join our lives, care for nature, pray and contemplate, study and write.
Published Works:
THE ROOT OF BEAUTY: A SPIRITUAL MEMOIR, THE EDGE OF TENDERNESS: A MEMOIR, THE BLUE SHAWL,THE FARNEAR JOURNALS, GYPSY BONES,
ALTAR MUSIC,
CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES,
WOMANCHRIST,
BLESSINGS,
FINDING STONE,
CARING COMMUNITY,
A CRY IN THE DESERT.
Los Angeles Times Best Novel of 2000 for ALTAR MUSIC.
Recipient of four prizes/commendations for CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES.